War and Propaganda
US Lies and Deception: the Pentagon Papers
Abstract
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 10 April 2003, Friday, 2 October 2009
The Pentagon Secret Papers
In early August 1964, the world was shocked by developments in Indo-china. The US Air Force began bombing civilians in the towns and villages of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. At the time, US spokesmen declared it had been done in “self-defence”, in “response” to an attack by some patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin on US warships. From then on that continued to be the accepted version, although US citizens and world public opinion were being monstrously deceived.
A metaphorical bombshell exploded in the US, in June 1971. What Washington had so carefully kept secret for years, about its conduct of US foreign affairs in SE Asia, came to light. Articles in the press, based on secret papers from the Pentagon archives, contained indisputable facts showing how, in utter secrecy, the US war against the people of Indo-china was contrived, launched and deliberately carried out, step by step.
The public does not often get to see behind Washington propaganda to glimpse the dirty methods used by the US leadership, an unelected oligarchy that remains in power irrespective of the electorate. What should have been clear in a proper democracy was kept hidden from the public in the USA and other Western countries behind a smoke screen of lies and falsifications conceived by the Washington ruling caste and its propaganda machine.
It all happened, though, 30 years ago, and a new generation has forgotten about the Pentagon Papers and the astonishing things they revealed that exposed US democracy as a charade. George Santayana, the Spanish-American philosopher, said:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Now we see his dictum proving itself as clearly as possible. US citizens have forgotten that their leaders and the perpetual Washington oligarchs are habitual liars, and now the US is led into another war against an independent state to satisfy the frustration and greed of the alien leaders of the US. The world is more aware that Americans are being deceived than they are themselves, but the revelations of the Pentagon Papers should have alerted US citizens to the duplicity of their leaders. But Americans have it drummed into them from childhood that, in the Great Society, the government acts constitutionally, and the press, radio and television give an honest account of what is going on. So, even when the clearest evidence comes straight from the horse’s mouth, too many ordinary Yankees refuse to believe it. They think they could not be so grossly and shamelessly deceived. They can be, and are, and will be again, as long as they bury their heads in the sand.
In the context of illegal and ignoble war, these pages offer reminders of past Yankee crimes. Perhaps, eventually, even the US people will learn to remember.
Government Censorship
The Pentagon Papers was an extensive Defense Department study commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S McNamara on 17 June 1967, and completed on 15 January 1969. The account was about 3,000 pages long, but it was supported by about 4,000 pages of documents, totaling 47 volumes.
The New York Times, having secretly received a copy of the Pentagon study, began printing a series of nine sets of articles and supporting documents. The next day Attorney General John Mitchell requested that the New York Times voluntarily stop publishing and return the materials. The New York Times declined. The series was completed on 5 July 1971, after Mitchell’s court restraining order had been resisted. The government had challenged publication of the entire set of narratives and documents on the grounds that they were designated top secret. Other newspapers, principally the Washington Post, but also the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the SL Louis Post-Dispatch and the Christian Science Monitor, also published articles on the Papers.
On 29 June, US Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska attempted to read portions of the Pentagon study into the Congressional Record from the Senate floor but was prevented from doing it by political maneuvring. So, he tried the Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, of which he was chair, and succeeded.
On Tuesday 15 June, the New York Times, at the behest of the government, was ordered by Federal District Court Judge, Murray I Gurfein, to halt publication for four days. The third set of articles had appeared that day. The hearing on the government’s civil suit to permanently enjoin the New York Times from further publication was set for Friday, 18 June. On the succeeding day, Judge Gurfein refused to order the New York Times to return the report immediately. He indicated that temporary harm to the New York Times “far outweighed” the “irreparable harm that could be done to the interests of the United States”. The New York Times had argued that the release of the documents would cause their source to be identifiable, because the copying machine could be traced, as could some handwriting. Instead, on 17 June, a list of descriptive headings was submitted to the Justice Department.
At this stage, the gist of the government’s argument was that the New York Times had violated a statute that made it a crime for persons who had unauthorized possession of government documents to disclose their contents when such disclosure “could be used to the injury to the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation”. The New York Times claimed that this anti-espionage law was not intended by Congress to be used against newspapers, and that this was a classic case of censorship of the press, forbidden by the First Amendment.
On Friday, 18 June, the Justice Department requested a restraining order against the Washington Post, which had initiated its series of articles on sections of the Pentagon Papers on the previous day. Judge Gerhard Gesell of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia refused to grant even a temporary restraining order, claiming there was no evidence of a threat to national security, but his decision was reversed on 19 June by a 2-1 circuit court of appeals vote that ordered Judge Gesell to hold a hearing on the government’s request. The two judges supporting the government indicated that they had acted on the belief that “freedom of the press, important as it is, is not boundless”. The third judge objected to the decision as a “suppression of one of our most important freedoms”.
In the New York Times case, on 18 June, Judge Gurfein extended the restraining order another day, so he could come to a decision. At the hearing, the government argued that the New York Times had violated the law and presidential orders. By publishing secret documents the New York Times had declassified them, and thus had “compromised our current military and defense plans and intelligence operations and had jeopardized our international relations”. The New York Times’s position was that the government overclassified documents to hide embarrassing information and that the First Amendment forbids the executive and judicial branches of the government to use “national security” as a reason for censoring articles, except as they might reveal troop movements.
On 19 June, Judge Gurfein announced his decision. He refused to enjoin the New York Times from publishing further articles based on the Pentagon study. His finding was that the government had failed to show harm to the national security to justifc prior restraint. He noted:
The security of the nation is not on the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions.
Judge Irving Kaufman of the Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit extended the injunction against further publication, pending the government’s appeal of the decision.
The Washington Post case also moved to the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia after Judge Gesell’s ruling on Monday, 21 June, that the Post could resume publication. As had Judge Gurfein, he also found that the government had failed to show…
an immediate grave threat to national security, which in close and narrowly defined circumstances would justify prior restraint on publication… It should be obvious that the interests of the Government are inseparable from the interests of the public, and the public interest makes an insistent plea for publication.
On 22 June, the Justice Department requested and received a restraining order from Federal District Judge Anthony Julian against the Boston Globe, which had published materials from the Pentagon study on this date.
Wednesday, 23 June was a day of conflicting decisions. Having first on 21 June decided in New York that the cases were too significant to be heard by the usual three judge team, the full complement of court of appeals judges—eight in New York, nine in Washington—held hearings. While the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled on a 7-2 vote that the Washington Post had the “Constitutional right to publish”, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on a 5-3 decision permitted the New York Times to publish, but only those materials cleared by the government as not being dangerous to national security. The three dissenting judges voted to approve the decision of the district court. In this case, Judge Gurfein was instructed to hold hearings to determine which documents would “pose such grave and immediate danger to the security of the United States as to warrant their publication being enjoined”.
The Chicago Sun-Times started publishing articles on 23 June based on the Pentagon study. However, the Justice Department did not take action to enjoin this newspaper, claiming the materials used had been declassified.
President Richard M Nixon announced on 23 June that all 47 volumes of the Pentagon study would be made available to Congress, but that the secret classification must be maintained, pending review of the documents by the executive branch. When delivered, the documents were placed in a vault.
After the New York Times and the Justice Department appealed their respective negative decisions on June 24, the Supreme Court agreed on June 25 to hear arguments. Four justices—Hugo L Black, William O Douglas, William J Brennan Jr, and Thurgood Marshall—dissented from this decision, voting instead to allow publication without a hearing.
The New York Times indicated it would not resume publishing under the authorized circumstances because its case was pending. To print articles defined as acceptable by the government would in effect be submitting to censorship. The Washington Post also indicated it would not resume publishing until the case was adjudicated. Chief Justice Warren F Burger placed both papers on equal publication restraint, using the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling as the basis.
Though eight of 11 newspapers in the Knight Newspapers group, a newspaper chain mainly in the eastern third of the country, along with the Los Angeles Times began publishing features of the Pentagon study on 24 June, the Justice Department did not attempt to enjoin them. The St Louis Post-Dispatch was restrained by court order on 26 June after it initiated an article series. The Christian Science Monitor series, initiated on June 29, was not enjoined.
On Wednesday, 30 June, the Supreme Court issued its 6-3 decision, upholding the right of the two newspapers to publish materials from the Pentagon study. The restraining orders against the Boston Globe and the St Louis Post-Dispatch were immediately dissolved.
Nicholas J Karolides in 100 Banned Books, explained that within the broad assertion that any attempt to ban news articles prior to publication bears a heavy presumption “against its constitutionality… the Government has not met that burden”. The justices’ opinions fell into three groups:
- The absolutists (Hugo L Black, William O Douglas and Thurgood Marshall)—The First Amendment forbids any judicial restraint. Justice Black indicated that a paramount responsibility of the free press “is the duty to prevent any part of the Government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell… far from condemnation [the newspapers] should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly”. Beyond this, Marshall argued that Congress had twice (1917 and 1957) considered and rejected such power for the courts. The Supreme Court would be “enacting law” if it had imposed restraint.
- The middle position (William J Brennan Jr, Potter Stewart and Byron White)—The press could not be blocked except to prevent direct, immediate and irreparable harm. This material did not pose such a threat. White added, however, that he “would not have any difficulty in sustaining convictions” under the law even if the security threats did not justify prior restraint.
- The dissenters (Warren E Burger John M Harlan and Harry E Blackmun)—The courts should not refuse to enforce the executive branch’s decision that the materials were confidential, affecting foreign policy. They also agreed with Justice White’s position regarding convictions.
This case was significant beyond the immediate decision related to these documents and these newspapers. It was the first time in the nation’s history that a newspaper had been restrained by a court from publishing an article. It was, further, the first time the Supreme Court had ruled on a case of prior restraint of a newspaper by the government.
Why The Truth Came Out
How, then, did such secret papers come to be published? Why did the editors of America’s most influential paper—the New York Times—which represents powerful interests, and the publishers of other US papers and magazines that normally covered up political deception, take a step that brought them into open conflict with the Republican Administration? It was proof positive, these same media claimed, of freedom of the press in the US. Yet, where was this freedom previously, when the war against the Indo-chinese people was being contrived and escalated, and the same journalists and editors kept quiet? The same periodicals that subsequently published the Pentagon Secret Papers, had steadfastly supported those they now censured. Two years before the adoption of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, one of the Sulzberger family which owned The New York Times, was proposing the violation of the neutrality of Laos.
James Reston, one of the New York Times policy makers, who was indignant over the conspiracy against democracy, sang a different tune earlier on the pages of The New York Times, (14 February 1962). In an article, The Undeclared War in South Vietnam, he fully endorsed the US military intervention in South Vietnam “to prevent a communist takeover”. American commentators agree with the political elite that people are not allowed to be independent. Independent people too often chose a politics that US leaders do not like. They are not permitted to be free enough to do that!
The US press zealously supported US actions in Indo-china, until the administration found itself up against a dead end and began to consider withdrawing its commitment there. The escalation of the war had been publicised by absurdly militaristic and patriotic propaganda in the press. The people who determine press policy then had to change themselves from shameless jingos into champions of the truth. Freedom of the press is relative. In the US, it depends on the Washington consensus, a consensus that is normally solid on the basic issues and how they are to be delivered to the public. Only when the consensus is split do the media show any real signs of its freedom, because some media bosses go one way and others the other, and the US general public, used to only a single viewpoint, suddenly get a shock.
The Pentagon Papers exposed the war in Vietnam as a black period of US history. The US militarists stopped at nothing—genocide, exterminating civilians in the Indo-chinese Peninsula, crimes against humanity, violations of international treaties and conventions governing the conduct of war, using chemical and bacteriological weapons, deceiving the world public—these are only some of the instances of the “honesty” of US administrations. Despite all the shenanigans the mighty US military machine got bogged down. Perhaps that is why the US choses to forget. Or perhaps the search is on for some easier victory worth remembering.
With the revelations of the Pentagon Papers, influential Washington leaders, senators and publishers, professors and columnists denounced the Tonkin Gulf Resolution which previously they had all cheered. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution in the House of Representatives was hypocritically called, A Resolution in Support of International Peace and Security in South-East Asia, and was passed unanimously. Congress and in the big press almost unanimously supported the original resolution. In the Senate, there were 88 votes for it and only two against. Voting on it had the solid support of both parties and was typically peppered with fervent patriotic speeches.
Were the Congressmen and Senators, who passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution by such a solid majority, so naïve they did not know what it meant? Were they fooled by the Washington oligarchs too? Wayne Morse, one of the two Senators who voted against the Resolution, made it clear to anyone listening (The New York Times, 29 February 1968) that he had sound evidence that the United States had played “a provocative role” in the incident. No one listened. Why were deaf ears turned to the truth? Why do US administrations and US legislators refuse to accept facts and abide by international laws and treaties signed by the USA, including the UN Charter?
The answer lies in the vast increases in appropriations made by Pentagon contractors, billion-dollar corporations. From 1964 to 1968, contracts went up over 50 per cent (The New Republic, February 7, 1970). The US News and World Report, (12 September 1966) seemed delighted that:
The nation’s factories are already operating at practically full capacity—and at a rate even higher than during the first year of the Korean War. Heavy new demands on industry may force some companies to use obsolete, high cost facilities to meet war demand.
The biggest share of war profits go to the corporations closest to Washington politicians most active in progressing war. Richard Barnet, a co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, wrote:
Freshman Congressman Lyndon B Johnson obtained a major defence contract for his principal financial backers, the Brown and Root construction firm. The same firm thirty years later was called upon to turn South Vietnam into a succession of military bases at considerable profit. In the Johnson years, Texas moved ahead to become the third-ranking state in military contracts. Between 1962 and 1967, the value of prime contracts awarded to Texas firms increased by 350 per cent.R Barnet, The Economy of Death, 1969
A section of US business benefited from the colossal military appropriations, and expected these benefits to keep on and to increase, but after some time what had looked like a political and economic bonanza became a defeat for the United States and a disgrace. Senator M Mansfield, Democratic majority leader in the Senate, pointed out that over 350,000 US casualties and $115 billion spent on the Vietnam war had failed to bring victory in a war that had utterly eradicated US world prestige and respect. Averell Harriman, well-known political and financial figure declared: “This war cannot be won”.
Many prominent army and navy men also came to realise that nothing could be gained by continuing war. Brigadier-General William Wallace Ford said he hoped:
We will act quickly to leave South-East Asia, serene in the knowledge that there is no greater courage than the courage to admit a mistake.The New York Times, March 2 1971
In May 1971, General David Shoup, one-time Commandant of the US Marine Corps, urged the early withdrawal of all US forces from South Vietnam. In the spring of 1971, Vice-Admiral Elmor Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations, admitted that the war in Vietnam did not have the American people’s support, adding that the nature of the war and the way it was being fought was the reason for it.
Business Divisions
For the US economy, the war in Vietnam was unfavourable. Whereas the Pentagon’s favourite military-industrial corporations, took in record profits, the US economy as a whole ran into many difficulties stemming from unbridled inflation and increasing disproportions in production.
In the spring of 1966, one of the most influential organs of the US establishment, Fortune, (April, 1966) sounded the alarm when it said:
The Vietnam war would bring on economic strains beyond what most economic experts appear to foresee, and beyond what makers of public policy appear to be anticipating.
George F Kennan, for many years closely connected with Wall Street bankers, wrote in one article:
Of course, it is little short of fantastic that a country facing such domestic problems as we now face, and one that stands virtually on the brink of a major international financial humiliation, should be continuing to pour its substance, to the tune of a full fourth of its budget and more than half a million of its young men, into a military adventure on the other side of the world, in an area to which its vital interests are only remotedly related.US News and World Report, June, 1968
Four years earlier, Kennan had apparently taken a different view of things. He had not objected to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution nor against the subsequent dispatch of “half a million of its young men, into a military adventure on the other side of the world”.
In the spring of 1967, an organisation called Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace was set up in the USA. Among its leaders iwas Sinclair Armstrong, one-time prominent member of the Eisenhower Administration and then Vice-President of the US Trust Company. Thousands of businessmen across the country joined. If anyone had proposed setting up such an organisation in 1964, at the time the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed, it would have seemed absurd, but by 1967 it no longer surprised anyone. US business was disenchanted with Washington’s policy in Indo-china, and denoted their frustrated hopes and growing apprehension over the adverse effects of the Vietnam war on the economy.
Prominent corporate spokesmen demanded an end to the war in Vietnam, among them billionaire Marriner Eccles, Chairman of the Board of the First Security Corporation. In early 1971, a monthly Morgan’s bank report noted that the war was a drain on the budget and a drag on research. The Morgan banking house statement might have been connected with the New York Times stance since the two had long-standing, close connexions.
Thomas J Watson, Chairman of the Board of IBM, said at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
The war in Vietnam is the major factor which has turned our healthy economy into an unhealthy one… The longer we continue, the more chaotic the nation will become. The damage we have already seen will take decades to repair.Congressional Record, June, 1970
All these statements are a reflexion of the disappointment among those who had hoped to quaff the benefits of war, and then had to face the realities of it. As military impotence and economic disruption made themselves felt in many spheres of business, the war in Indo-china led to a deep split in US high society and its intellectual servants in Washington. The spokesmen of the military-industrial complex refused to forgo their war-profits, whereas those who had no cut of them, and had suffered from inflation and the economic imbalance of a war economy, wanted the party to end and society to sober up.
Some corporations and cartels with a stake in the US occupation of South-East Asia had urged continued war in Indo-china for selfish reasons. Other groups with capital invested mainly in Western Europe, the Middle East or even at home had displayed growing apprehension over their interests in these areas being jeopardized.
General Earle G Wheeler, one-time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that the Middle East presented a much greater danger than the Far East! Various other reasons for a change in Washington’s policy were frankly spelled out by the New York Times shortly before its publication of the Pentagon Papers (11 March 1971):
There can be little hope of rapprochement with China as long as Peking perceives an expanding American threat on its borders. An essential first step toward removing this obstacle would be a firm disavowal by Washington of any intention to invade the Chinese border state of North Vietnam, or to give military support to such an invasion by the South Vietnamese.
Protest Movement
A final factor influencing the alignment of political forces in the USA over the war in Indo-china was the massive anti-war movement in the country, which even included some of the people normally beguiled by patriotic propaganda. In scale and scope the anti-Vietnam war protest movement went beyond anything that had happened in the postwar history of the USA. All sections of US society were deeply divided. The conflict even split families and alienated parents and children.
The massive demonstrations, in which millions of Americans participated, the flood of letters and wires received by legislators, influenced the outcome of federal elections. President Johnson timed his order terminating US air-raids on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam for the 1968 Presidential elections. President Nixon’s time-table for the partial withdrawal of US troops from the theatre of war operations in Indo-china had been drawn up to match the stages of the 1972 electoral campaign. Each of the rival groupings, the pro- and anti-war parties, were forced to consider the electorate.
Nixon used to refer to the “burdensome legacy he had inherited from his predecessor”, the Democrat, Johnson. Actually, the military-industrial complex, the wealthiest of all lobbies, had continued the old pro-war line, and influenced the new Administration, and Nixon, after promising to pull out in 1968, did not, but instead extended the war by invading Cambodia and Laos. The Nixon Republican Administration thereby underscored the bipartisan policy of the war in Indo-china.
Yet, the anti-war faction of business, and the political lobbies, periodicals and politicians representing their quite different interests from the war party, took a more realistic view. They sought ways to heave the nation from the bog of war, and the problems it engendered. It was not some sudden craving for peace or justice among the party politicians, publishers and businessmen that explained the growing opposition to the policy of successive Administrations, but a deep split over the war among those who run the USA.
The Senate is not normally inclined to oppose an incumbent president. Since the Second World War, no US Administration faced such strong opposition in the Senate as the Nixon Administration. The Republican Party tried to explain this opposition as coming from the Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress. During the Congressional elections in November 1970, the Nixon-Agnew leadership sought to change the balance of forces in Congress. After the elections, the President said that the Administration had an “ideological majority” in the Senate.
In fact, far from being reduced, the opposition had increased. In June 1971, after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Mansfield Resolution, setting a nine-month deadline for the pull-out of US forces from Vietnam, under certain conditions, was passed by a majority. Nixon’s opponents were not only Democrats, but prominent members of President Nixon’s own party like Senators Cooper, Hatfield, Percy and Goodell. Senator Birch Bayh wrote in the New York Times:
Each day means a further diversion of our energy, attention and resources from our own pressing needs here at home. Each day means $27 million that could otherwise help to provide better health care, better education, better housing, better transportation, and a better environment. Each day means continuation of the divisions within our own society, divisions that threaten to tear us apart.the New York Times 23 April 1971
An outcome of this split was the stand taken by a number of influential US periodicals which, with the support of their economic backers, had to challenge the Administration by publishing the Pentagon Papers. If the editors of The New York Times, the Washington Past and other newspapers had not been backed by powerful men, and if they were not motivated by compelling reasons for taking such a step, the Pentagon Papers would have emerged in to public scrutiny.
Bipartisan Responsibility
Different theories were aired in the press about why the Pentagon Papers had emerged. Some circulated the idea that men close to the Republican Administration had a hand in publishing the papers, to create difficulties for the Democratic Candidate—by highlighting Johnson’s perfidy—on the eve of the Presidential elections. Thus, Republican Senate leader, H Scott, and Chairman of the Party’s National Committee, R Dole tried to absolve the incumbent Administration from any responsibility regarding the published papers, since the events referred to took place under the Johnson Administration. The invasion of Laos and Cambodia, which was ordered by the Republican Nixon, was not an escalation of the war!
However, the Republican Administration’s stand over the publication of the Pentagon Secret Papers showed that the Administration has been alarmed by the snowballing exposures. Despite public indignation, the Nixon Cabinet applied vigorous pressure to stop the publication, including direct action by Secretary of Defence, Melvyn K Laird and Attorney-General J N Mitchell.
The papers showed clearly that the top-ranking leaders of the USA had not hesitated to stoop to outright hypocrisy and lies to cover up their actions against the interests of the nation. The credibility gap between American voters and the country’s leaders yawned like a chasm. Every American wondered, “If we have been cheated before, what stops us from being cheated again?” US democracy, that all Americans were proud of had been found wanting. One wonders now, thirty years later, with the same things plainly happening again, why all this has been forgotten?
Extensive material among the published papers showed that the same policy was continued by all the successive postwar Administrations, both Democratic and Republican. President Richard Nixon, president when the revelations were made, said when he was Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration:
If the French withdraw Indo-china would become communist-dominated within a month. The United States, as a leader of the free world cannot afford further retreat in Asia… the Administration must face up to the situation and dispatch forces.the New York Times, 18 April 1954
What President Eisenhower himself thought on the subject, even after the action taken by President Johnson, is evident from statements like this one:
I would do anything that would bring the war to an honourable and successful conclusion as rapidly as I could… we should use whatever is necessary, not excluding nuclear weapon to end the fighting in Vietnam.Congressional Record, 7 October 1966
A year later the ex-President declared (Congressional Record, 29 November 1967) that the US Armed Forces should carry out raids on the territory of North Vietnam and pursue the enemy into the territory of Laos and Cambodia.
The stand taken by the Republican Party candidate, Barry Goldwater, during the 1964 Presidential elections, is well known. Goldwater said “Johnson should order air strikes against Hanoi itself if that were necessary” for a victory in South Vietnam (the New York Times, 22 February 1965).
Could it be that the later Republican leaders did not share Goldwater’s stand, and did not support him? No chance! Speaking in Chicago in January 1965, Richard Nixon stressed his solidarity with Goldwater, adding that he had more devotees in the Republican Party than any other Republican since the time of Theodore Roosevelt (the New York Times, 22 January 1965). Those who claimed they were in no way responsible for the Johnson Administration’s acts and pretended an outraged innocence, hoped that the US public had a short memory. Indeed, they have, but not that short!
In April 1964, Nixon declared (The Japan Times, 15 April 1964):
Vietnam is the cork in the bottle. If it is lost the battle of South-East Asia is lost.
A month later, the future President insisted that the US aim should be to “liberate” the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Now equivalent party hacks are saying they want to liberate Iraq. “Liberating” Vietnam then did not mean it would be independent, and so the Vietnamese would be free to do as they liked. Nixon had added that if the USA pulled out of the area, South Vietnam and Laos were bound to be taken over by the communists. In other words, they were not to be free and independent. “Liberation” in Washington-propaganda-speak means doing as Uncle Sam says. Will Iraq be any different?
The lack of basic differences during the 1968 election campaign between President Johnson’s line and that of his Republican rivals is borne out by the World Journal Tribune, which wrote:
The four Republicans who are the major contenders for President Johnson’s job have now completely surrounded him on the issue of Vietnam. Gov Ronald Reagan is far to his right, Richard Nixon somewhat to his right, Sen Charles Persy to his left, and Gov George Romney has just plopped into his lap.World Journal Tribune, 11 April 1967
In late June 1971, The New York Times said:
What the White House had feared might happen, did. The accounts began to include secrets of the Nixon Administration as well as those of its predecessors… But it soon became evident that the story of the Pentagon Papers was going to change many things in Washington…the New York Times, 27 June 1971
Is there need to say more? Only those who are prepared completely to ignore the historical facts can pretend that the Republicans did not bear any responsibility for contriving, launching and carrying out the war against the people of Indo-china. The blame for these foul deeds, deceit and hypocrisy, falls on successive administrations, not some particular political leader or Washington administration—the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Jonhson, Nixon and Ford administrations, the Washington elite, the US Congress, the leadership of the Democratic and the Republican Parties—and the news media using its “freedom” to do as the war parties told them.
Some Books to Consult
- Karolides, Nicholas J, Bald, Margaret, and Sova, Dawn B, 100 Banned Books, 1999
- Salter, Kenneth W, The Pentagon Papers Trial, 1975
- Shapiro, Martin, Tbe Pentagon Papers and the Courts, 1972
- Sheehan, Neil, Smith, Hedrick, Kenworthy, E W, and Butterfield, Fox, The Pentagon Papers 1971
- Turner, Robert F, Myths of the Vietnam War: The Pentagon Papers Reconsidered,
- Ungar, Sanford J The Papers and the Papers, 1972
